Whitethorn Woods

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘And you wouldn’t mind, only that’s what I do, solve problems for a living, I’m an agony aunt and I don’t even know how to face my own sister.’

  I did a deal with her there and then, I’d get the manager on the case, we’d get the stain out if she could solve my problem. I told her about Vera and Nick who loved each other but hated each other’s possessions, and about Glenn and me who wanted to get into the rat-filled basement and live there.

  She asked how many bedrooms were in the house. Four, I explained.

  ‘Far too many for them, they’re not going to be hearing the patter of tiny feet at their age. Give them a study each, get your fellow to put up shelves and things for all the paint tubes in one and the pressed flowers in the other. Do up the basement, tell them you’ll mind the house, scare away the burglars, give Rotary the cat a bowl of something and fresh water when they go on holidays, and look after them when they’re old. It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  And amazingly it was.

  And even more amazingly there was some kind of terrifying solvent that got the stain out of the borrowed dress.

  Glenn and his uncle shelved the two studies in no time, and as the wise agony aunt realised, Vera and Nick had no objection to sharing bedroom, bathroom, sitting room or kitchen as long as their precious belongings were safe.

  Then they attacked the basement with Rotary looking on loftily as some rodents were removed. Rotary was the kind of cat who didn’t exert himself unnecessarily. Why attack something big and menacing when you had humans who could do it for you? And I asked Vera about St Ann’s private life, and she said that St Ann was married to a fellow called Joachim.

  Happily, I asked?

  ‘No better or worse than anyone’s marriage, I’d say,’ said Vera who had never tried marriage at all.

  I think she saw I was disappointed at that. I wanted a better ending.

  ‘Oh, go on then,’ Vera said grudgingly. ‘Happily, I’d say. If there had been any sacrificing the children or pestilence, we’d have heard about it.’

  There was plenty of room for us in the basement. It was just gorgeous, so we made a grand little nest for ourselves. Mam gave us some old saucepans from home and some cleaning materials which she came across when doing the offices in the early mornings. Glenn’s mam gave us some curtains. My dad gave us a lawnmower so that he would never have to use it again, not that he had ever used it much. Glenn’s dad gave us a tip for a greyhound, which won at five to one.

  Nick gave us his bed, since he would be sharing Vera’s now. Alma gave us a bunch of flowers and a lecture about there being No Good in Men. Todd had gone his way.

  Glenn is terrific when he comes up to my parents’ house, once called Chez Sharon. He gives my dad a hand with all the work my dad didn’t do during the week. Glenn and I are getting married next year when we have enough saved to have a nice wedding day. Vera said if it was in the summer we could have it in the garden and she could be my bridesmaid. She said she only meant it as a joke but I said that it would be great, I’d love it. I said I could be her bridesmaid, maybe at St Ann’s Well when she and Nick finally got it together. But she laughed at the very idea of it.

  She and Nick aren’t going to get married at all, apparently. That’s oldies for you. And people laugh when we say we met Vera and Nick on a Singles holiday.

  ‘You are funny, you and your fancy tales,’ they say.

  As if you could make up something like that.

  CHAPTER 4

  Friendship

  Part 1 – Malka

  I met Rivka Fine, let me see, oh, it was years and years ago now, back in the 1960s. We were on a kibbutz in the Negev desert for the summer. I was the first person from Rossmore to do such an adventurous thing, head for the Middle East and pick oranges and pluck chickens. I remember that way back then poor Canon Cassidy said that though it was a great thing to go to the Holy Land and walk where Our Lord had walked, I would have to be careful that I didn’t lose my faith when I met so many people of other beliefs.

  I didn’t know that Rivka and I would be friends at first – she seemed a bit sulky, moody even, while I was delighted with everyone and talked to them all. They came from so many countries: Morocco, Romania, Turkey, Germany. They had all learned to speak Hebrew. There were only a few English speakers around, so we had to manage, Rivka and I, learning that tapoosim meant oranges and toda raba meant thank you. I tried to learn ten words a day but actually with the heat and the hard work in the kitchen and everything, it was too much and I settled for learning six.

  We had to share a hut so we learned quite a bit about each other. She was there because her parents back home in New York felt guilty about not emigrating to Israel, so they wanted to be able to say, ‘Our daughter is out there as a volunteer in the desert.’ I was there because I had taught Latin to two little Jewish boys back in Rossmore and their parents, Mr and Mrs Jacobs, had given me a trip to Israel to thank me. It was the holiday of a lifetime, they had even found me this kibbutz to work in because a cousin of Mrs Jacobs had been there one summer and had enjoyed it.

  And I thought it was really great. I fell in love with Shimon who was originally from Italy and he loved me too and we were going to set up our own business growing gladioli when his National Service was over.

  I suppose Rivka may have been a little bit jealous because Shimon was always coming and hanging round our hut. Not that we slept with each other or anything. I know, I know, but we just didn’t in those days. Afraid, I suppose. Anyway that’s the way it was.

  Rivka asked me was I really going to work in a gladioli farm, and I said I sure hoped so, all I had to do now was go back home to Rossmore and sort of soften up my family for the whole idea, which wasn’t going to be easy. There was bound to be interference from Canon Cassidy about marrying a non-Christian. Then we’d have to deal with his family – which was going to be another day’s work, what with the Jews believing that the line sort of passed down through the woman and they wouldn’t care for him bringing a non-Jewish girl back to them.

  And then Rivka fell in love with Dov who was Shimon’s friend and that made everything more cheerful and the four of us could go off for drives. Rivka had no long-term plans to live with Dov in Israel back then. She said she had to go back to New York and marry a dentist or a doctor. It was as simple as that. No, she couldn’t take Dov with her when he had finished his National Service. Dov was from Algeria. His people lived in a hut. No, Rivka didn’t mind that – but her mother would. Big time.

  It was a magic summer. We were busy taking oranges from trees, and feathers from chickens, and stray hairs from our eyebrows. We rinsed our hair in lemon juice, we both lost tons of weight because we hated the margarine they used so we just ate oranges and pieces of grilled chicken. If they could see me now, all those people back in Rossmore, I kept thinking.

  Then, quicker than we could have imagined, it was all over and time for me to go back home, back to being a teacher in St Ita’s in Rossmore, and it was time for Rivka to go back to working in a travel agent’s office in New York. We were firm friends by then and hated saying goodbye. No one else would understand the summer we’d had and how we loved the Friday night dance and the red rock of the desert. We both knew that tales of Shimon and Dov would sound like foolish holiday romances to our friends and would be like a red rag to a bull if mentioned to our parents.

  We swore that we would keep in touch and we did.

  I wrote a tear-stained letter to Rivka when I heard from Shimon that there was no future in gladioli. Or anything else. Rivka wrote in rage to say that Dov’s brother had been in touch to say that Dov couldn’t read English writing and please to stop pestering him. I told Rivka about how my mam had offered to pay for golf lessons in the hopes that I would meet a lawyer or a banker at some golf resort. Rivka explained that her mother was taking her for a week to this mountain place which was like a marriage market. She must look her very best, it was make or break time.

  It must hav
e been break time. It certainly wasn’t make time.

  Rivka was promoted to become office manager but there was nothing moving in the marriage stakes. This was a heavy stress factor at home apparently. It was stress time with my mam too. Several serious rows, with fairly unforgivable things said: ‘When I was your age, Maureen, I was married and pregnant,’ and, ‘You don’t think you are going to get better looking once you’ve passed twenty-five, do you?’ I said that I’d prefer to die wondering than to put myself up to be chosen by these bog-ignorant, so-called professional men of her choice who preferred drink and golf to female company anyway. My dad just said that it would be very nice to have Peace in his Time, which was all he asked.

  Back in Rivka’s place things were getting really serious, she told me.

  Her mother was now advertising for a husband for her in some suitable magazine. I knew that if I had to spend the summer vacation at home this year I would go mad.

  My mam would be sending me up to St Ann’s Well in Whitethorn Woods to pray for a man and I would probably kill my own mother with my bare hands and go to jail, and this would not be Peace in his Time or anyone’s time for my quiet gentle dad. So I applied for a summer job teaching in a children’s camp in America.

  First I was going to stay with Rivka for a week in New York.

  ‘What kind of a name is that? Rivka?’ my mam asked.

  ‘It’s her name,’ I heard myself say mutinously, as if I were a six-year-old.

  ‘But where does it come from? I mean, was she baptised Rivka?’ My mam was in one of those moods. I was too weary to explain that Rivka was very unlikely to have been baptised at all.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I said glumly.

  I allowed my mind to drift away while my mam went on about the fact that for all my great education I actually never really knew anything. Men liked a woman who was alert, awake, alive – not dreamy and drifty like I was.

  I thought it was a small miracle that my mam didn’t know just how alert and alive I had been out in the Negev desert with Shimon. For all the good it had done me. Anyway I would be out of here soon in New York with Rivka.

  She met me at the airport and we hugged each other in delight. On the way to her house she told me that she was very sorry to lay all this on me but she had implied to her mother that I was Jewish and would I mind pretending that I was? Just for a week?

  It was idiotic, I said. It wasn’t as if Rivka was going to marry me!

  ‘It’s just for an easy life, just for one less battle to fight,’ she begged. Snap! It was the same situation at home for me. We sighed over mad mothers.

  ‘So I said your name was Malka,’ she confessed.

  ‘Malka?’ I shouted.

  ‘It’s the Hebrew for queen,’ Rivka explained, as if that made any difference.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  The 1960s were meant to be a decade of change, of looking forward. Not for me, not for Rivka. I couldn’t be Maureen for her mother, she had to have been baptised for mine.

  Heigh-ho.

  It was a great help having worked for Mr and Mrs Jacobs, and having been in Israel. At least I knew about Seder, and Pesach, and High Holidays. I knew about Hanukkah instead of Christmas, I knew about milk and meat dishes being separate, even the plates they were served on, and about not eating things that had cloven feet.

  Mrs Fine was beautifully dressed and very pretty. She fussed a lot, as Rivka had warned me. But one thing I hadn’t been told. She absolutely adored her daughter.

  I said this to Rivka when we were alone up in the amazing frilly bedroom.

  ‘Maybe,’ Rivka said, ‘but what’s the use if it’s only a suffocating kind of love? I’d prefer not to be loved at all.’

  We got through the first days without too many problems. Mrs Fine wanted to know did my mom keep a kosher kitchen. So I said she did and I even heard myself describing the synagogue that the Jacobs family went to when they went up to Dublin, not that I had ever been inside it. I had to excise from my conversation the fact that I taught with nuns in St Ita’s convent and make the school into a secondary school for the small but active mythical Jewish community in Rossmore. In fact there were only three Jewish families in Rossmore, but no need to burden Mrs Fine with this.

  They were pleased with me, and they were happy that I, like their Rivka, lived with my parents at home. They thought it was fast for young girls to live in apartments, they said.

  Young girls! – Rivka and I sighed to each other when we were on our own. As if we were young! Pathetic old maids, nearly a quarter of a century on this earth and no sign of a husband or even a fiancé.

  When they addressed me as Malka or called out that name, I feared that I never responded quite quickly enough, but Rivka told me I was doing so well, and she apologised again for what was even in those days a totally ludicrous farce.

  And then it was time to go and I took a long, tiring train journey to the summer camp where I was called Maureen again, not Malka, which I had begun to get accustomed to. It was all much more sporty than I had thought, lots of hikes and field trips with the kids and baseball, and endless consoling of girls who thought their mothers hated them because they had been sent away for the summer.

  ‘Mothers don’t hate us,’ I explained over and over. ‘They just think they are doing the best for us. It’s always wrong, but honestly they don’t know that.’ I think I mended a few fractured relationships and calmed down a few troubled hearts but then teachers are always thinking they do that anyway. Maybe they didn’t take a blind bit of notice.

  And I was doing it by mail too.

  Rivka wrote constantly to say that her mother had really admired me and it was Malka this and Malka that since I had left. Malka had such a sunny disposition and Malka never ate between meals and was interested in all the people who lived near by instead of dismissing them like Rivka did.

  I wrote back saying that I had decided life was mainly an act. There was I, a complete fake, passing myself off as a member of their community. They had been taken in. There was a lesson there somewhere. We must put on a show for people, pretend that we were calmer, happier, more in control than we really were.

  Rivka wrote back to say that she had thought about this a great deal and that I might indeed have found the Secret of the Universe.

  And about a week later, when our camp was playing a series of games against another camp, I met Declan who was a teacher from a small country place a few miles outside Rossmore and we fell madly in love.

  So much so that he said he wanted to come and meet my parents the moment we got back to Ireland. And even though he wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer, only a teacher like myself, he was everything my mam wanted: a Catholic, from a nice family, and had really good manners.

  By Christmas he said he wanted to marry me.

  I wasn’t too sure about wanting to go and live in the wilds of the country and maybe getting absorbed into his huge family network; but they were all very welcoming and in those days no self-respecting man made any lifestyle changes for a wife or anything.

  So that’s what I did – marry him and go to live in the wilds of the country. I kept Rivka informed every step of the way and, as luck would have it, she had met Max who was not exactly a dentist but was a very successful businessman who owned travel agencies, and her mother was utterly delighted with him, and she would be getting married too. So she came to my wedding in Ireland first and it was lovely to have her, and my mother was so excited about what she would wear and the fact that Declan had an uncle who was a judge coming to the wedding that she managed not to interrogate Rivka about her odd name, and didn’t even notice that Rivka’s mother had sent a wedding gift addressed to ‘Dear Malka’.

  Rivka got everything wrong in Rossmore. She kept calling the statue in the church the Holy Heart instead of the Sacred Heart. She was astounded by the length of the nuptial Mass and the papal blessing, and the fact that a lot of the women wore head-scarves and mantillas on their heads durin
g the ceremony rather than splashing out on hats.

  She couldn’t take in the amount of drink served at the wedding, and the number of people who had songs that they insisted on singing …

  But it was all a great occasion and Declan kept squeezing my hand and I had never believed I could be so happy.

  Declan and I went to Spain for two weeks for a honeymoon and then came back to live in his part of the world, which was a sort of mountainy place where nothing much happened. Because I was a married woman I couldn’t teach any more so time hung heavy on me. Days seemed very much the same except that we went to lunch with his mother every Sunday and his sisters called around every week to enquire whether or not I was pregnant.

  My letters from Rivka were a lifeline in this odd backwater. She told me what books to read, she suggested that I set up a kind of amateur mobile library and drive around to people who were housebound. And everyone liked my doing that. Declan went so far as to say that I was inspired.

  But he wouldn’t come to Rivka’s wedding with me. It was too far, too expensive, he wouldn’t know where to put himself with all these Jewish people and their customs. No, really he wanted to pass on this one. Well, you know when you’re not going to win. I cheered myself up, I told myself that if I were to be Malka there again it would be easier to be without Declan. And indeed it was.

  It was all so different – the canopy in the Fines’ huge garden and the singing and chanting in Hebrew, and the smashing a glass which was something to do with the destruction of the Temple or something, but I couldn’t really ask, what with my being Malka and meant to know all this already.

  Max was very cheerful and friendly and whispered to me that he knew my little secret. I had no idea what he was talking about. Did he know that I had gone to a doctor in Dublin to get the contraceptive pill because I didn’t want to get pregnant until I had the library up and running? Did he know that I found Declan’s mother and three bossy sisters a hundred times worse than my own mother had ever been and that I went to huge lengths to avoid meeting them?